Herman Courtney

Think back in time.  Remember old pictures.  Scenes from old movies.  Etched in my mind are dark, shadowy men.  Rough looking.  Old threadbare military overcoats.  Tall hats.  Weatherworn, bearded faces.  The type of men who always stood with their back to the fire.  Their eyes always darting, always on the lookout.

My Grandad lived with a generation of such men.  Men that seemed to materialize when you built up a fire and turned your hounds loose.  Sometimes they came in old pickup trucks, but mostly on horseback, or maybe riding a mule.  Grandad always kept me close when those dark men showed up.  They were not to be bothered or distracted.  They liked their whiskey and they loved to hear the hounds running.  They did not care for people who talked too much, or bothered them, or particularly told them what to do or what not to do.

One Fall, early in the 1920's, a farmer in northern Kentucky decided he didn't want hounds running over his farm.  Tobacco was already housed,  corn already cut.  Hounds weren't doing any crop damage, but this particular farmer just didn't care for the bay of hounds at night.  He was known to have shot at and maybe even killed a hound or two.  Word spread about the farmer.

My Grandad got word to meet up with some out of town hunters one evening.  He gathered up a few hounds, saddled his horse and rode through Mayslick about dusk, heading for the meeting place.  When he got there, he met up with a small group of the aforementioned "men".  An hour or so after dark, they went up on a hillside above the farmer's house that didn't like fox dogs.  They proceeded to turn their hounds loose, pretty much right in his back yard.  Grandad thought it was a mistake, but before he could question it, the farmer came running out of his house, carrying a lantern and his rifle.  Grandad was ready to shout at him, to not shoot his dogs when the "dark men" all pulled their pistols.  There leader told everybody to hold their fire until the farmer got 40 yards or so from his house.  The he pulled out two German Lugers he had brought home from WWI.  His first shot he knocked the lantern out of the farmer's hand, then everybody opened up.  Grandad hurriedly asked what they were doing. Amid the fire flying out of the knuckle on top of the Lugers, Herman Courtney responded that they were "making a fox hunter" out of the farmer.

Turned out they didn't shoot him, but put a good scare into him.  Next day the farmer rode to Grandad's farm and told him that fox hunting was now welcome on his farm.

Grandad was not one of the dark men, who stayed back away from the fire.  But he was friends with them, and shared their love of fox hunting.